ThinkingSkull.com

Just got the word, so for everyone who voted me up, thanks! Here’s an excerpt:

Your video will be shown before several feature films at the Jacksonville Film Festival at the festival executive director’s discretion. May 21, 2008, the final night of the film festival, Jacksonville.com will be hosting the event and announcing the winner based on Editors’ Choice. The winner will be presented with a $500 prize courtesy of the Jacksonville Film Festival.

Your video will also be included in the trailer video of the 2007 48 Hour Film Project winners that will be screened tonight on the giant projector in the Jacksonville Landing courtyard during the 2008 48 Hour Film Project Launch Party festivities beginning at 5:30 p.m.

As I already said, I may not win, but it’s nice to see how far it can get.

So there was a local contest with the 2008 Jacksonville Film Festival for entries to make a 30-second ad. Heck, there were only a couple up there, so with 12 hours left before the deadline, The Reaper and I put a story and shot list together, took 2 hours to engineer the graphics, 90 minutes to shoot, and 2 hours in editing to upload it with 15 minutes to spare. Hey, it may not win the contest, but to go from concept to finish in under 12 hours is a feat I wasn’t sure I could pull of with any real (or reel?) quality.

The video is on Jacksonville.com, and mine is called “Jacksonville.com: NOT Scary.” With any luck, they’ll show it all over the festival. And yes, The Reaper is officially now a commercial whore. Enjoy!

As I’ve had to consolidate all my instant message programs (using http://meebo.com) to communicate online with everyone I’d like to connect with, it has come to my attention that an equal number of bloggers refuse to acknowledge any posts outside their own network. It’s called an RSS reader, people!

No matter. As I attempted to divine a solution as clever as Meebo for my multi-blog problem (because EVERY network wants your blog on their network to mine for data), how to allow posts from one to update to all the others every time I get the whim to post?

As it turns out, nearly every blog also wants you to be able to post from anywhere, including email. And since I prefer to use WordPress, it occurred to me that someone else may have thought, “If I could just email my updates to every other blogging system out there, no one would be left out.” Good news, folks… if this test works, the problem’s solved.

I seriously have no intent to start a public photo album of images showing myself, but there are a few of you out there that, for whatever voyeuristic reasons you have, must put a face to the text. Well, there ya go, something integrated into a little image I’ve been working on just for the heck of it. There’s a better one someplace on the site, but you’ll have to find it if you really have nothing better to do.

Yes, I put my movie site’s banner up there, but it’s REALLY cool! Besides, it directs traffic where I want it to go… where I get paid. Enjoy!

Our local Garden Ridge store has already started building up their Halloween shop, everything but the costumes. Decorations, creepy crawly things, the works. Always fun to see what new junk the party stores have come up with!

According to my records, I’ve been on-line since 09/30/1995 (don’t ask me how I know that), and for nearly all of that time I went by the “handle” or ID of “The Crystal Lich.” For those who know me or are in the know, the monster I’m referring to is an undead spellcaster who has, through spells and such, made himself immortal to continue his pursuit of magical knowledge and power… or, in my case, ‘Net knowledge and power.

Back in those days (mostly on AOL and IRC), anominity was all the rage. No one was known by their “real life” name, and trust came with repeated contact and quality of how you treated others (after all, you never knew if the person you were talking to was really the same person with another identity). As the Internet grew and became mainstream, the “secret identities” went out out as the mundanes started asking, “Well, if your opinion is legitimate and you stand by it, why are you hiding who you are?”

And slowly, real faces began to emerge from behind altered celebrity pictures and clever pseudonyms. And then the came spam, and with spam the scams, the worms, the viruses, the trojans, and the rootkits. There was identity theft, there were hacks, and there were cyber-terrorists who, if left unchecked, would become every bit as deadly as their real-life counterparts.

Then came the “blogs” and the popularity of the social networks and the glory of remaining anonymous again. Places like Friendster and MySpace started encouraging anominity because the knowledgeable few took advantage of innocent young and have learned the usefulness of a friendly white lie. Anyone who doesn’t understand this likely doesn’t lock their doors nor changes their passwords and likely has their PIN number written on their ATM card.

“The Crystal Lich” was a relic of the Old Guard, of which there are very few still remain. With video blogs, podcasts, and new venues for self-created content, “Grim D. Reaper” has emerged as The Lich’s replacement and the new identity to fit into a new online environment carry MovieCrypt.com onward (that is, for as long as anyone still cares about one undead guy’s opinion).

MovieCrypt.com has had a store for some time. I do sell the occassional mug or mousepad, but very few people other than myself ever buy white t-shirts imprinted with color designs. The problem: the target audience HATES white t-shirts. Gray is tolerable, but, well, just LOOK at the website! It’s all black!!! In fact (and I’ve always felt like a hypocrite for doing it) but for my OWN apparel, I order special embroidered items from a company called Queensboro (and are often more expensive but guaranteed for 10 years).

Well, at long last (and I’ve no idea how they’ve pulled it off), BLACK shirt printing is coming to CafePress, and I cannot wait! Heck, I may even image the website itself as a t-shirt!!!

Fear not; I’m just using ThinkingSkull.com as a test platform for a radically different design for MovieCrypt.com… one that is very nearly complete. People who frequent the ‘Crypt often have two complaints: reading articles are hard on the eyes, and the site looks too much like a horror site for people to realize we review more than just horror.

So, to address both complaints, MovieCrypt is going to get a bit brighter. Like something out of a fog or a ghost story, we’re designing a background for the top of the site to give it the creepy, supernatural feel without as much blood splatter. To be honest, this change has been coming for a while, because all horror sites are starting to look identical. Fortunately, WordPress Themes gives me the flexibility to do something more, and do it I shall!

Wired.com news has an interesting tidbit on something I’ve always enjoyed about the game of chess: creativity instead of memorization. Sure, you can read every chess book ever written to see how all the Grand Masters won their in their day, but what if the board was a bit more random?

Bobby Fischer drove many so-called “grand masters” batty with his short-goal, no-grand-plan chess strategies. His variant form, Chess960 (or “Fischer Random Chess”), works as follows: “Pawns begin where they always do. However, the pieces behind them on the white side are arranged at random, with the proviso that bishops must end up on opposite colors, and the king dwell somewhere between the two rooks. The black pieces are lined up to mirror the white. ” In other words, there are 960 beginning board variations before play begins and book knowledge is useless.

While Fischer himself has become somewhat more eccentric, the variation he invented is finally picking up steam and breathing new life into the same ol’ game.